I am a CPA in Texas with an MBA from the University of Chicago. I have seen a lot and made many mistakes. Hopefully by now I will have learned something from them. Just as importantly, you may learn something from my mistakes. You can e-mail me by clicking on my "View my complete profile".

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The Education Mystery

"Here is my nominee for the biggest mystery: the decline and fall of public school education. Don't agree? Give me a minute and I'll convince you. ... Simultaneously, over the last 70 years, literacy has fallen, SAT scores have fallen, American competitiveness has fallen, and the general knowledge or ordinary citizens has fallen. Teenagers graduate from high school who can't read their diplomas; the country now has 50,000,000 functional illiterates. I recently saw on television that the wealthiest, most sucessful country in the world--that would be us--hovers around 18th internationally on reading, and 25th in science. ... It's as if I told you that an ordinary man consumed 5000 calories a day and lost weight. So this, I submit, is the greatest mystery in our history. But why have our educators allowed this decline to take place? Or is 'allowed' a trick word, and they have actually abetted this failure? ... What we see in education makes sense only if we assume that our educators have an agenda we don't know about, or that they are malevolent, or both. ... Here is my deduction: that those at the top of the Education Industrial Complex, since the time of John Dewey, have been collectivists first, and educators second. The goal of creating an educated child was too often superceded by the goal of creating a cooperative child", Bruce Price, 27 May 2009 at: http://www.tcsdaily.com/printArticle.aspx?ID=052609A.

I have said things like this since I was in high school. In reading this piece I thought of Dewey and Lenin. Lenin said, "Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever".

Brain dead. Brain dead. You *know* I was discouraged all the way through school, God forbid someone show they are smart enough to figure out this is "busy work" and "I'd prefer a challenge, thanks." in 4th grade.

Point being, what do we do to turn this around? I can teach my 6 year old. I can try to get to the accountants I reach on a daily basis. What can we collectively do to turn this around?